Edition: True Tragedy of Richard IIIHow Sir Anthony Woodville was Imprisoned
Source
Modernized excerpts of
How Sir Anthony Woodville, lord Rivers and Scales, governor of prince Edward, was with his nephew, lord Richard Grey, and other[s] causeless, imprisoned and cruelly murdered. Anno 1483.prepared from Mirror for Magistrates (Baldwin).
The king was bent too much to foolish pleasure:
In banqueting he had so great delight,
This made him grow in grossness1 out of measure.
Which as it kindleth carnal appetite,
So quencheth it the liveliness of the spirit
Whereof ensue such sickness and diseases,
As none can cure, save death, that all displeases.
The duke of Gloucester, that incarnate devil,
Confedered2 with the duke of Buckingham,
With eke3 lord Hastings, hasty both to evil,
To meet the king, in mourning habit came,
(A cruel wolf, though clothed like a lamb)
And at Northampton, whereas then I baited,
They took their inn, as they on me had waited.
The king that night at Stony Stratford lay,
A town too small to harbor all his train:
This was the cause why he was gone away.
While I with other did behind remain:
But will you see how falsely friends can feign?
Not Sinon4 sly, whose fraud best fame rebukes,
Was half so subtle as these double dukes.
First to mine inn cometh in my brother false,
Embraceth me: “Well met, good brother Scales,”
And weeps withal. The other me enhales5
With, “welcome cousin, now welcome out of Wales:”
O happy day, for now all stormy gales
Of strife and rancor utterly are ’ssuaged,
“And we your own to live, or die, unwaged!”
This proffered service, sauced with salutations
Immoderate, might cause me to suspect,
For, commonly, in all dissimulations,6
Th’ excess of glavering7 doth the guile detect.
Reason refuseth falsehood to direct:
The will therefore, for fear of being spied,
Exceedeth mean, because it wanteth guide.
This is the cause why such as feign to weep
Do howl outright, or wailing cry, “ah, ah!”
Tearing themselves, and straining sighs most deep:
Why such dissemblers as would seem to laugh,
Breathe not sigh, but bray out “Ha! Ha! Ha!”
Why beggars feigning bravery are the proudest:
Why cowards bragging boldness wrangle8 loudest.
For commonly all that do counterfeit
In anything exceed the natural mean,
And that for fear of failing in their feat:
Through close demeanor, that their wiles did wean
My heart from doubts, so many a false device,
They forged fresh, to hide their enterprise.
They supped with me, propounding friendly talk
Of our affairs, still giving me the praise,
And ever among the cups to me-ward walk:
“I drink to you, good coz,” each traitor says:
Our banquet done, when they should go their ways,
They took their leave, oft wishing me good night,
As heartily as any creature might.
These glaverers11 gone, myself to rest I laid,
And doubting nothing, soundly fell asleep.
But suddenly my servants, sore afraid,
Awaked me, and drawing sighs full deep:
“Alas,” quoth one, “my lord, we are betrayed.”
“How so,” quoth I, “the dukes are gone their ways.”
“Th’ have barred the gates, and borne away the keys”.
When I had opened the window to look out,
There might I see the streets each were beset.
My inn on each side compassed about
With armed watchmen, all escapes to let:
Thus had these Neroes12 caught me in their net,
But to what end, I could not throughly guess.
Such was my plainness,13 such their doubleness.
My conscience was so clear, I could not doubt
Their deadly drift, which less apparent lay
Because they caused their men return the route
That rode toward Stony Stratford, as they say,
Because the dukes will first be there today.
For this (thought I) they hinder me in jest,
For guiltless minds do easily deem the best.
By this14 the dukes were come into mine inn,
For they were lodged in another by.
I got me to them, thinking it a sin
Within my chamber cowardly to lie,
And merrily I asked my brother why
He used me so. He, stern, in evil sadness,
Cried out: “I arrest thee, traitor, for thy badness.”
“How so,” quoth I, “whence riseth your suspicion?”
“Thou art a traitor” quoth he, “I thee arrest.”
“Arrest,” quoth I, “why, where is your commission?”
He drew his weapon, so did all the rest,
Crying, “yield thee, traitor!” I, so sore distressed,
Made no resistance, but was sent to ward,15
None save their servants assigned to my guard.
This done, they sped them to the king in post,16
And after their humble reverence to him done,
They traitorously began to rule the roost.
They picked a quarrel to my sister’s son
Lord Richard Grey: the king would not be won
T’ agree to them, yet they, against all reason,
Arrested him, they said, for heinous treason.
Sir Thomas Vaughan and Sir Richard Haute,
Two worthy knights, were likewise apprehended.
These all were guilty in one kind of fault:
They would not like17 the practice then pretended:
And seeing the king was herewith sore offended,
Back to Northampton they brought him again,
And thence discharged most part of his train.
There, lo! Duke Richard made himself protector18
Of king and realm, by open proclamation,
Though neither king nor queen were his elector.
Thus he presumed by lawless usurpation:
But will you see his deep dissimulation?
That day, and with it, this false friendly word:
“Commend me to him, all things shall be well,”
“I am his friend, bid him be of good cheer.”
These news I prayed the messenger go tell
My nephew Richard,21 whom I loved full dear:
But what he meant by “well,” now shall you hear.
He thought it “well” to have us quickly murdered,
Which not long after, thoroughly he furthered.
For straight from thence we closely were conveyed
From jail to jail northward, we wist22 not whither.
Where, after a while, we had in sunder23 stayed,
At last we met at Pomfret altogether.
Sir Richard Ratcliffe bade us welcome thither,
Who openly, all law and right contemned,
Beheaded us, before we were condemned.
Notes
4.The crafty Greek spy who allowed himself to be captured during the Trojan War in order
to deliver misinformation about the nature of the wooden horse.↑
5.Greets, welcomes.↑
9.Concealed, hid.↑
10.Expertly.↑
11.Flatterers.↑
12.Men resembling the Roman emperor Nero in displaying cruelty, tyranny, or profligacy
(OED
Nero, n. 1).↑
13.Innocence.↑
14.By this time.↑
15.Prison.↑
16.Great haste.↑
17.Support, endorse.↑
18.Rivers accuses Richard of illegally appointing himself, but this decision was supported
by council, as Baldwin himself notes in his Mirror for Magistrates entry from Richard’s perspective that “The lords and commons all with one assent,
/ Protector made me both of land and king” (Segar 382), which removes the question of a coup. More and Hall place the nomination of protector
at a council meeting prior to Edward’s arrival from Ludlow (Wilson 302), while in The True Tragedy, the playwright adds Edward IV’s imprimatur.↑
20.Plate.↑
21.The young Richard of York.↑
22.Knew.↑
23.Separately.↑
Prosopography
Andrew Griffin
Andrew Griffin is an associate professor in the department of English and an affiliate
professor in the department of Theater and Dance at the University of California,
Santa Barbara. He is general editor (text) of Queen’s Men Editions. He studies early
modern drama and early modern historiography while serving as the lead editor at the
EMC Imprint. He has co-edited with Helen Ostovich and Holger Schott Syme Locating the Queen’s Men (2009) and has co-edited The Making of a Broadside Ballad (2016) with Patricia Fumerton and Carl Stahmer. His monograph, Untimely Deaths in Renaissance Drama: Biography, History, Catastrophe, was published with the University of Toronto Press in 2019. He is editor of the
anonymous The Chronicle History of King Leir (Queen’s Men Editions, 2011). He can be contacted at griffin@english.ucsb.edu.
Anonymous
Dimitry Senyshyn
Dimitry Senyshyn (Clyomon and Clamydes, text) has current research focusing on Shakespeare’s tragicomic romances and their
relation to a native tradition of popular romance. He has co-edited an old-spelling
edition of The True Tragedie of Richard the Third for QME with Jennifer Robert-Smith. He contributed to the preparation of the REED Inns of Court volume, and he has published in Theatre Research in Canada, Early Theatre, and the Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception. He can be contacted at dimitry.senyshyn@gmail.com.
Helen Ostovich
Helen Ostovich, professor emerita of English at McMaster University, is the founder
and general editor of Queen’s Men Editions. She is a general editor of The Revels Plays (Manchester University Press); Series
Editor of Studies in Performance and Early Modern Drama (Ashgate, now Routledge),
and series co-editor of Late Tudor and Stuart Drama (MIP); play-editor of several
works by Ben Jonson, in Four Comedies: Ben Jonson (1997); Every Man Out of his Humour (Revels 2001); and The Magnetic Lady (Cambridge 2012). She has also edited the Norton Shakespeare 3 The Merry Wives of Windsor Q1602 and F1623 (2015); The Late Lancashire Witches and A Jovial Crew for Richard Brome Online, revised for a 4-volume set from OUP 2021; The Ball, for the Oxford Complete Works of James Shirley (2021); The Merry Wives of Windsor for Internet Shakespeare Editions, and The Dutch Courtesan (with Erin Julian) for the Complete Works of John Marston, OUP 2022. She has published
many articles and book chapters on Jonson, Shakespeare, and others, and several book
collections, most recently Magical Transformations of the Early Modern English Stage with Lisa Hopkins (2014), and the equivalent to book website, Performance as Research in Early English Theatre Studies: The Three Ladies of London in Context containing scripts, glossary, almost fifty conference papers edited and updated to
essays; video; link to Queen’s Mens Ediitons and YouTube: http://threeladiesoflondon.mcmaster.ca/contexts/index.htm, 2015. Recently, she was guest editor of Strangers and Aliens in London ca 1605,
Special Issue on Marston, Early Theatre 23.1 (June 2020). She can be contacted at ostovich@mcmaster.ca.
Janelle Jenstad
Janelle Jenstad is a Professor of English at the University of Victoria, Director
of The Map of Early Modern London, and Director of Linked Early Modern Drama Online. With Jennifer Roberts-Smith and Mark Beatrice Kaethler, she co-edited Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words, New Tools (Routledge). She has edited John Stow’s A Survey of London (1598 text) for MoEML and is currently editing The Merchant of Venice (with Stephen Wittek) and Heywood’s 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody for DRE. Her articles have appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Elizabethan Theatre, Early Modern Literary Studies, Shakespeare Bulletin, Renaissance and Reformation, and The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. She contributed chapters to Approaches to Teaching Othello (MLA); Teaching Early Modern Literature from the Archives (MLA); Institutional Culture in Early Modern England (Brill); Shakespeare, Language, and the Stage (Arden); Performing Maternity in Early Modern England (Ashgate); New Directions in the Geohumanities (Routledge); Early Modern Studies and the Digital Turn (Iter); Placing Names: Enriching and Integrating Gazetteers (Indiana); Making Things and Drawing Boundaries (Minnesota); Rethinking Shakespeare Source Study: Audiences, Authors, and Digital Technologies (Routledge); and Civic Performance: Pageantry and Entertainments in Early Modern London (Routledge). For more details, see janellejenstad.com.
Jennifer Parr
Jennifer Parr holds a Masters degree in European and Renaissance Drama from the University
of Warwick. She is an independent scholar and professional director and dramaturge
based in Toronto. As an undergraduate at the University of Toronto she became involved
as an actor with the P.L.S. Medieval and Renaissance Players’ productions of the Medieval
Mystery Cycles returning later to direct an all female company in the York Cycle Fall
of the Angels for the international full cycle production in 1998. Her recent productions
as director and dramaturge include an all female Julius Caesar and an experimental all female adaptation of Richard III: RIchard 3, Queens 4. Her ongoing research into the historical Richard III and the various theatrical
interpretations led to her joining the company of TTR3 as an observer and historical
resource for the cast. She also writes a monthly column on music theatre and dance
for The WholeNote magazine.
Jennifer Roberts-Smith
Jennifer Roberts-Smith is an associate professor of theatre and performance at the
University of Waterloo. Her interdisciplinary work in early modern performance editing
combines textual scholarship, performance as research, archival theatre history, and
design in the development of live and virtual renderings of early modern performance
texts, venues, and practices. With Janelle Jenstad and Mark Beatrice Kaethler, she
is co-editor of Shakespeare’s Language in Digital Media: Old Words New Tools (2018). Her most recent work has focused on methods for design research that deepen
interdisciplinary understanding and take a relational approach. She is currently managing
director of the qCollaborative (the critical feminist design research lab housed in the University of Waterloo’s Games Institute, and leads the SSHRC-funded Theatre for Relationality and Design for Peace projects.
She is also creative director and virtual reality development cluster lead for the
Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation (DOHR) project. She can be contacted at
jennifer.roberts-smith@uwaterloo.ca.
Joey Takeda
Joey Takeda is LEMDO’s Consulting Programmer and Designer, a role he assumed in 2020
after three years as the Lead Developer on LEMDO.
Kate LeBere
Project Manager, 2020–2021. Assistant Project Manager, 2019–2020. Textual Remediator
and Encoder, 2019–2021. Kate LeBere completed her BA (Hons.) in History and English
at the University of Victoria in 2020. During her degree she published papers in The Corvette (2018), The Albatross (2019), and PLVS VLTRA (2020) and presented at the English Undergraduate Conference (2019), Qualicum History
Conference (2020), and the Digital Humanities Summer Institute’s Project Management
in the Humanities Conference (2021). While her primary research focus was sixteenth
and seventeenth century England, she completed her honours thesis on Soviet ballet
during the Russian Cultural Revolution. She is currently a student at the University
of British Columbia’s iSchool, working on her masters in library and information science.
Mahayla Galliford
Project Manager, 2025-present; Assistant Project Manager, 2024-2025; Research Assistant,
2021-present. Mahayla Galliford (she/her) graduated from the University of Victoria
with a BA (honours with distinction) in 2024, and an MA English in 2026. Mahayla’s
undergraduate research explored early modern stage directions and civic water pageantry.
Her SSHRC-funded MA thesis project focuses on transcribing, editing, and encoding
early modern girls’ manuscripts, specifically Lady Rachel Fane’s May Masque in collaboration with LEMDO.
Martin Holmes
Martin Holmes has worked as a developer in the UVic’s Humanities Computing and Media
Centre for over two decades, and has been involved with dozens of Digital Humanities
projects. He has served on the TEI Technical Council and as Managing Editor of the
Journal of the TEI. He took over from Joey Takeda as lead developer on LEMDO in 2020.
He is a collaborator on the SSHRC Partnership Grant led by Janelle Jenstad.
Nicole Vatcher
Technical Documentation Writer, 2020–2022. Nicole Vatcher completed her BA (Hons.)
in English at the University of Victoria in 2021. Her primary research focus was women’s
writing in the modernist period.
Peter Cockett
Peter Cockett is an associate professor in the iArts (Integrated Arts) program at
McMaster University. He is the co-editor, with Melinda Gough, of Engendering the Stage in the Age of Shakespeare and Beyond (University of Toronto Press, 2025) which publishes the findings of their 2018 Performance
as Research (PaR) workshop at the Stratford Festival Lab. He is the general editor
(performance), and technical co-ordinating editor of Queen’s Men Editions. His PaR directing credits include King Leir, The Famous Victories of Henry V, and Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (2006), Clyomon and Clamydes (2010), and Three Ladies of London (2015) for the Shakespeare and the Queen’s Men project (SQM). The process behind
the 2006 productions is documented in depth on the project website Performing the Queen’s Men. For the PLS, the University of Toronto’s Medieval and Renaissance Players, he has
directed the Digby Mary Magdalene (2003) and the double bill of George Peele’s The Old Wives Tale and the Chester Antichrist (2004). He also directed An Experiment in Elizabethan Comedy (2005) for the SQM project and Inside Out: The Persistence of Allegory (2008) in collaboration with Alan Dessen. Peter is a professional actor and director
with numerous stage and screen credits. He can be contacted at cockett@mcmaster.ca.
Samuel Seaberg
Samuel Seaberg, a University of Victoria English undergrad, enjoys riding his bike.
During the summer of 2025, he began working with LEMDO as a recipient of the Valerie
Kuehne Undergraduate Research Award (VKURA). Unfortunately, due to his summer being
spent primarily in working to establish an edition of Thomas Heywood’s If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Part 2 and consequently working out how to represent multi-text works in a digital space,
his bike has suffered severely of sheltered seclusion from the sun. Note: Samuel now
works for LEMDO as the Assistant Project Manager, much to his bike’s chagrin.
Toby Malone
Toby Malone is an Australian/Canadian academic, dramaturg, and librarian. He is a
graduate of the University of Toronto (PhD, 2009) and the University of Western Australia
(BA Hons, 2001), and the University of Western Ontario (MLIS, 2023). He has worked
as a theatre artist across the world, with companies including the Stratford Festival,
Canadian Stage, Soulpepper, Driftwood Theatre Group, the Shaw Festival, Poorboy Theatre
Scotland, Pittsburgh Public Theatre, Arizona Theatre Company, CBC, BT/A, and Kill
Shakespeare Entertainment. He has published in Shakespeare Survey, Literature/Film Quarterly, Canadian Theatre Review, Borrowers and Lenders, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, appears in published collections with Routledge, Cambridge, and Oxford. Publications
include two monographs: dapting War Horse (Palgrave McMillan) and Cutting Plays for Performance: A Practical and Accessible Guide (Routledge), and is currently co-writing an updated version of Shakespeare in Performance: Romeo and Juliet with Jill L. Levenson for Manchester UP. Toby has previously taught at the University
of Waterloo and the State University of New York at Oswego, is currently Research
Impact Librarian at Toronto Metropolitan University.
Tracey El Hajj
Junior Programmer 2019–2020. Research Associate 2020–2021. Tracey received her PhD
from the Department of English at the University of Victoria in the field of Science
and Technology Studies. Her research focuses on the algorhythmics of networked communications. She was a 2019–2020 President’s Fellow in Research-Enriched
Teaching at UVic, where she taught an advanced course on
Artificial Intelligence and Everyday Life.Tracey was also a member of the Map of Early Modern London team, between 2018 and 2021. Between 2020 and 2021, she was a fellow in residence at the Praxis Studio for Comparative Media Studies, where she investigated the relationships between artificial intelligence, creativity, health, and justice. As of July 2021, Tracey has moved into the alt-ac world for a term position, while also teaching in the English Department at the University of Victoria.
William Baldwin
Bibliography
Baldwin, William.
How Sir Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers and Scales, Governor of Prince Edward, was with his Nephew, Lord Richard Grey, and Other Causeless, Imprisoned and Cruelly Murdered.Mirror for Magistrates. London: for Thomas Marshe, 1563. L4r-M7r. STC 1248.
OED: The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford University Press, 1989.
Segar, Francis.
How Richard Plantagenet Duke of Gloucester Murdered His Brother’s Children, Usurping the Crown and in the Third Year of His Reign Was Most Worthily Deprived of Life and Kingdom, in Bosworth Plain, by Henry, earl of Richmond, after called King Henry the VII, the 22 of August 1485.Mirror for Magistrates. Ed. J. Haslewood. London: Lackington, Allen, and Co., 1815.
Wilson, J. Dover.
Shakespeare’s Richard III and The True Tragedy of Richard the Third, 1594.Shakespeare Quarterly 3.4 (1952): 299–306.
Orgography
LEMDO Team (LEMD1)
The LEMDO Team is based at the University of Victoria and normally comprises the project
director, the lead developer, project manager, junior developers(s), remediators,
encoders, and remediating editors.
QME Editorial Board (QMEB1)
The QME Editorial Board consists of Helen Ostovich, General Editor; Peter Cockett, General Editor (Performance); Andrew Griffin, General Editor (Text); and Janelle Jenstad General Editor (Text).
University of Victoria (UVIC1)
https://www.uvic.ca/Metadata
| Authority title | How Sir Anthony Woodville was Imprisoned |
| Type of text | Primary Source |
| Publisher | University of Victoria on the Linked Early Modern Drama Online platform |
| Series | Queen’s Men Editions |
| Source |
Born-digital, peer-reviewed document prepared by Toby Malone. First published in the QME 2.1 anthology on the LEMDO platform. Encoded in TEI-XML
by the LEMDO Team.
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| Editorial declaration | Encoded in TEI P5 according to the LEMDO Customization and Encoding GuidelinesEdited according to the ISE Editorial Guidelines, with reference in the revision stage to the DRE/NISE Editorial Guidelines and the LEMDO Encoding Guidelines. |
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Queen’s Men EditionsThe Queen’s Men Editions anthology is led by Helen Ostovich, General Editor; Peter
Cockett, General Editor (Performance); Andrew Griffin, General Editor (Text; until
2026); and Janelle Jenstad, General Editor (Text; 2026–)
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| Document status | published, peer-reviewed |
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McMaster University Poculi Ludique Societas University of Waterloo University of Toronto Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance Studies University of Victoria Friends of the ISE |
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